History for life: simms and Nietzsche compared.(William Gilmore Simms and Friedrich Nietzsche)(Essay)

In his biography of William Gilmore Simms John C. Guilds says of his subject that he had "a special fondness for history" and was, in Guilds's view at least, "the only American author of the nineteenth century to envision, design, initiate, and consummate an epic portrayal of the development of our nation." (1) Elsewhere Guilds says that "Simms's fullest expression of the relationship between history and art is found in the essay entitled The Epochs and Events of American History, as Suited to the Purposes of Art in Fiction." He goes on to say that Simms's theory of art "puts history in the forefront as the subject for literature" while his theory of history "makes literature the only true medium through which the accomplishments and lessons of history are made meaningful to man." In brief, for Simms, there is a unity of history and art and thus "[t]he scholar who wishes to understand a people or an age must reach and understand the poet-philosophers (i.e. the historical romancers) of that people and age." (2) These remarks on the demands that the craft of history makes on the historian to arrive at the fullest possible self-exposure to the thought and art of the period being studied and re-created remind us forcefully of remarks on the same subject made by Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus it is my purpose in this article to discuss the balance of similarities and differences between Simms and Nietzsche on the question of historiography. In so doing I would hope to bring the American-"Romantic" and the Continental-"Modern" understandings of the meaning and nature of the "historical sense" into the same field of vision. To this end I propose to focus on the second section of the work pointed to by Guilds and on the second of Friedrich Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations known best in the English-speaking world as "The Use and Abuse of History."

It is not a frequent thing for William Gilmore Simms to be associated with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. The differences between the two nineteenth-century writers are evident enough. But A. J. Conyers in discussing Simms's theological views notes that, while Simms "may not have admired the styles of Christianity he found in its formal expression," he certainly "did not go as far as his younger contemporary Nietzsche, who said 'in reality there is only one Christian and he died on the cross.'" Nevertheless Conyers quotes lines from Simms--"ay better thousand times to be, the pagan on some Sodomitic shore" (3)-to indicate Simms's attitude to "positive" or institutional Christianity.

Such an observation goes some way towards setting the tone for the discussion that follows linking Simms and Nietzsche on history. Nietzsche is famous for his Antichrist which was his great attempt to lay the Christian religion to waste, and there is certainly nothing comparable in Simms. But, if Simms was a Christian, "what kind of a Christian was he?" asks David Aiken. Aiken notes that Simms "was aware of the Higher and Lower Biblical criticism of his day" and that Simms was held back from any serious intention of taking on the Pulpit by his conviction that the New Testament was "However true and good, & wise & pure in many things, a wonderfully corrupt narrative." So even though he wishes to make the case that Simms was at bottom a Christian Aiken must acknowledge that at the least he was "no conventional Christian." (4)

I shall argue that, although Simms "certainly did not go as far as his younger contemporary Nietzsche" in arguing for the writing of history as at one and the same time the supreme artistic and supreme political act, still, he went a considerable way in that direction. One thing we should note at the outset is the importance to Simms of his vocation as a historian. This point is made strongly by C. Hugh Holman. Holman says that if one places Simms's Francis Marion "beside the Elizabeth or Mary of Scots or James 1 or Louis XI of Sir Walter Scott, the figure of Marion reveals how completely Simms felt the restraint of history." Indeed, Holman says, "everything present in the Revolutionary romances has a recognizable parallel in method in the Waverley Novels, except for the chilling restraint with which Simms handled history." Holman's conclusion is that if Simms had been willing "to free himself from the harsh bondage of fact" his books "would not suffer so greatly from unevenness of dramatic tone and impact." (5) So we can rest assured that Simms was as much an "empirical" historian as he was fictionalizer and certainly was no simple fabulist. In the view of some he might have taken the factual side of history with more seriousness than was good for his art.

Holman also makes an important point for Simms's relationship to Nietzsche when he notes that Simms was keenly aware of the fatalism or determinism implicit in Scott's novels. Scott's characters are active but at the same time "helpless participants in occurrences beyond their control." Scott's stories "are finally shaped by the iron mould of history." (6) The point here is that Simms accepted that "genius" cannot distort or reshape history that is well known to all. But at the same time he saw it as part of "genius's" "noblest executions" to show the human will at work and how individuals can have an impact on their own destiny at some basic level. It is important for the historical artists to show that individuals can master history rather than for it to be eternally the other way around.

But if Holman portrays Simms as under the severe "restraint of history," Jon L. Wakelyn argues for the essentially propagandistic nature of much of Simms's work. The fourth chapter of Wakelyn's book on Simms is in fact entitled "Historical Propagandist. "Wakelyn says that Simms "was formulating a view of history which called for the historian to be a special pleader for a cause, to write history as propaganda." (7) Wakelyn seems to be saying that Simms has to be rated a "propagandist" because he is "philosophic" or "artistic" in the way he treats of historical subjects. Wakelyn says of Simms that he was "[d]edicated and myopic to the end," and "died as he had lived, in a romantic haze of his own propaganda of self-deception."(8) But in what some might term the most "offensive" work in the light of contemporary values--"The Morals of Slavery"--an essay which to be sure was clearly designed to defend the South's sectional interest, we find Simms beginning his discussion not with a concern that the South never be criticized but that the truth be known. "We should labor in her [truth's] assistance," Simms says, "not by persuasive and specious doctrines, and fine flexible sayings, but simply by a firm adherence to what we know, and to what we think we have already gained."

 
  As yet, we have, confessedly, but partial glimmerings of her 
  divine presence ... [but] if we gather, each, but a single 
  shell from the great centre of truth.... we shall at least 
  diminish the toils of those who shall follow in our own 
  footsteps along the shores of the same solitary and unknown 
  regions. (9)